Zoya Sardashti

Theatre is an obsession that keeps me from pursuing a career in politics. Born in Denver, Colorado to an American mother and an Iranian father, I spent most of my childhood in the southern part of the United States. Since 2010 I have operated as the creative director of Home Soil, a contemporary performance collective, and independently produced performances in Seoul, London, Los Angeles, and Glorenza. In Florence I spend time at the State Archives examining performative elements in diplomatic encounters between the Persian Empire and Italy to support my doctoral research. Usually my work exists between the domains of theatre, live art, and choreography.

Aligned with oral history traditions, my curatorial approach to the archive, The Future of Iranian Theatre, is a collection of singular, interdependent stories that are experienced privately with distant strangers across multiple mediums. The amplified, recorded and/or mediated voice focuses and repositions sound. Audio recordings enhance our contact with the past, momentarily dislocating us from the here and now. Images like paintings, drawings, and photographs can evoke other similar visual sensations from our subjective or collective (read: shared) histories. The linearity of an account marks it chronologically. Some texts are shaped by their function, and some historical contexts have (in)formed (aesthetic) ways of generation and production. The memories of theatre artists are inserted into the existing archive, thusly building a dialogic scaffolding for theatre and visual art networks. The Future of Iranian Theatre newly maps artistic lineages across disciplines and fields enabling connections and encounters. Can the interplay between audio, image, and text invent a new kind of reality that challenges projections cast by the drama of politics moving towards the utopian potential of a telematically connected society?

Humans require a distance from reality to interpret the world. When we watch documentaries or read newspapers, an approximation of reality is staged in a series of dramatic images and an overtly direct approach to the “facts”. These delivery systems intend to incite particular emotional responses, often times anger, shame, and fear.It is difficult for humans to accept defeat. It is in our instinct to learn from our fears and overcome them. Perhaps we escape to the theatre or museum because we require the possibility to observe, examine, and re-create situations which are not in our control. Art can help us overcome our fears.

Puppets are models of humans or animals that reduce society to a copy or a representation. They are used as a reflection to analyze reality through an amalgamation of metaphors, images and paradoxical situations. Sometimes the audience can watch the puppeteer perform alongside the puppet’s body as they give voice to its actions while assigning certain emotional qualities to define the object’s movements. Although we understand the manipulation that seamlessly transpires between the puppeteer and puppet, it is still possible to experience a suspension of disbelief. In this moment emotions such as compassion, tenacity, and determination are evoked. Distance in this context is anchored in reality, placing emphasis on emotional intelligence and an empathy.

Don’t Touch me by Majid Abbasi Farahani

Movement orients, disorients, and reorients us through a series of actions. It confronts failure while demonstrating the potency that life might endure, however, we know it cannot. Physical practices typically involve a body in motion. Centuries of ideological movements have determined how bodies should be depicted. An inner vision can manipulate forms and thoughts by revealing various topographies of movements performed by groups of people. Imagining an event opens up a mental and emotional space which can be, with haptic skill, a sculpture. Sculptures are traces of actions left by the movement of an artist, thus no longer held within their body. Objects cannot express movement without a human body.

Additional Posts by Zoya —

Curatorial Statement

Aligned with oral history traditions, my curatorial approach to the archive, The Future of Iranian Theatre, is a collection of singular, interdependent stories that are experienced privately with distant strangers across multiple mediums. The amplified, recorded and/or mediated voice focuses and rep...

Roxanne Varzi

I can’t think of an initial inspiration, inspire is to breathe and I was born with a questioning, fuzul, mind. I’ve always asked a lot of questions and when it comes to relaying the information I collect, my aesthetic tends more toward a fragmented visual, narrative, sound-scape form that might ...

The Human Body

رستم و سهراب Rostam and Sohrab by Pouya Afshar
The human body is assigned to a primordial state. Even if this body is in a precognitive, possibly illiterate state, there is a desire to move and express sounds. Before Darwinism humans used various animals, such as bears or tigers, to def...